Article excerpt

THE radical modern poets who planned and carried out the murder
of the Metrical Muse were the first to miss her. Savage and
bombastic in their attacks on the iambic norm of English poetry,
Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams eventually
mourned the loss. As early as 1918, Pound admitted that free verse
had become "as prolix and as verbose" as the metrical verse it had
replaced; in 1942, Eliot lamented "the craving for continual novelty
of diction and metric"; and William Carlos Williams confessed in
1932, "There is no workable poetic form extant among us today."

But it was too late. And since the passing of the great moderns,
free verse has become a lingua franca of Western society. Poetry has
ceased to matter to many more people than those who write it. But
recently, certain poets have begun to write in meters again. (The
abiding presence of twice-Pulitzered Richard Wilbur has been a
continuing source of solace, for he is a master of English verse.)

Now, poet Timothy Steele has written a quiet, scholarly book that
investigates the crime. Given the situation, he can afford to be
sympathetic with the original killers, who were reacting to
something in Victorian verse. The numbingly insistent metrical
patterns are almost as boring as free verse has become in our time.

Since there is no real question of who committed the fell deed,
Steele's investigation moves quickly into the larger question of why
and how. The original killers, so brazen in self-advertisement,
offered many excuses. As Steele shows in his first chapter, Eliot
was self-serving in his claims of precedence. But while Dryden and
Wordsworth were indeed reformers of diction, they both extended and
refined the metrical heritage. Nobody before Eliot had attacked the
iamb, which, with its systole-diastole pattern of emphasis, is
literally the heartbeat of English.

Eliot, and others, got into further difficulty as they tried to
defend poetry against prose by imitating it. Again, Steele is
sympathetic: The Victorian novel was stronger artistically than
Victorian verse. As it turned out, modern advances in poetic theory
- such as the "variable foot" - echo the ways the ancient Greeks
described their prose. …